ProWrestling.Cool Presents: The Dot-Coolies – PW.C’s Best of 2019
The time has come once again to decide the best that 2019 in wrestling had to offer, and so Owen, John, Trace and Oscar have convened to decide on 2019’s brightest moments and biggest stars! Our winners are below, but should you want to hear the long and painful deliberation process, you can do so by checking out the episodes below:
Part 1: https://prowrestling.cool/pw-c-best-of-2019-part-1/
Part 2: https://prowrestling.cool/pw-c-best-of-2019-part-2/
Best New Theme Song
Evil of the Sky (or whatever Io Shirai’s new theme is called, holy shit it’s so good) [NXT]
Io Shirai’s heel theme is so good, it’s probably illegal. We’re serious, that’s the only explanation we can come up with for why she’s had this theme song for almost six months now and WWE has still refused to release an official version for purchase. To be fair, we understand why: no new entrance theme this year better captures the feeling of absolute terror any wrestler should be experiencing any time they step in the ring. When you hear that drone that opens the song, you know someone’s about to die. Isn’t that how it should be?
Runners-up: 100% Voltage (Sho) [NJPW]; I Fell (Darby Allin) [AEW]
Most Potential in the Next Year
Darby Allin [AEW]
Anyone who’s seen his prior work in places like Evolve and Defy Wrestling could have seen this coming from a mile away – just one look at Darby Allin and his creepy, half-skull make-up and you can tell that the twenty-two-year-old former skateboarder and charisma dynamo is a star in the making. But not even the half of this website familiar-to-fully-acquainted with Allin’ indie runs could have foreseen just how well, and how immediately, his charms would translate to live prime-time television. Plenty of comparisons have been made between Allin and a young Jeff Hardy and it’s hard not to see a lot of the seemingly reckless attitude of the “Charismatic Enigma” in Allin, but if anything, the comparison fails to capture just how much Allin truly stands on his own. If Allin can stay healthy and keep his momentum going, there’s no limit on how far he can go in 2020.
Runners-up: Private Party [AEW]; Keith Lee [NXT]
Best Show Aethetic
AEW Dynamite
Professional Wrestling in the modern era lives in the shadow of Vince McMahon’s run with WWF in the 1980s. We can endlessly argue about whether or not that’s a good thing, but the fact remains that the neon colors and over-the-top personalities of the Hulkamania era are engrained in wrestling’s DNA. For many fans of a certain age, the bright and colorful cartoony spectacle like something out of an arcade game is exactly what we remember being, even if it never was quite that audacious.
The first thing you notice about AEW Dynamite is that it is every bit as audacious as your memory of what wrestling used to be. The exploding rainbow of color run dust in the intro isn’t just a neat effect – it sets the tone for a show that feels like the vibrant, technicolor wonderland that televised wrestling was in our minds. And yet there’s a class to AEW’s presentation that the WWF of old always lacked, one best represented by the techno-chandeliers that adorn the set. It may be a goofy, brightly lit and colored cartoon, but it’s a cartoon where everyone involved completely respects the craft.
In a year where we’ve seen several fresh new takes on how to present a wrestling show–running the gamut from perfectly executed love letters to a very specific era of Southern wrestling, an NFL on Fox-style upgrade to WWE’s classically top-tier production with cool future brackets, and a wrestling show that feels like it was produced by Troma Entertainment (and John, its one fan, will hear no more of your complaints)–AEW Dynamite stands just a bit above the rest by mixing the old with the new, and then amping it up to eleven.
Runners-up: NWA Powerrr; WWE SmackDown
Most Improved
Jon Moxley [AEW]
“Dean Ambrose” looked awful as he closed out his WWE run in the beginning of 2019, seeing a wrestler that was the epitome of squandered potential look completely checked out and miserable to be there. That feels like a lifetime ago after the summer Jon Moxley had, first publicly signing with AEW at Double or Nothing and then taking New Japan by storm to win the IWGP United States Championship and competing in the G1 Climax 29. He was so unmotivated during the end of his run in WWE, and you couldn’t blame him with the garbage they were having him do as a character. So seeing him tear it down in New Japan and bringing back deathmatch wrestling to a big platform in AEW is a night-and-day difference. For the few of us that always held out hope that “Ambrose” could still reach those heights he had the potential to reach but never quite did, Jon Moxley is more than we could have possibly imagined.
Runners-up: Bray Wyatt [WWE]; Lance Archer [NJPW]
Tommy Tallarico Presents The Cool Spot Award for (Dot) Coolest Spot
Keith Lee hits Dominick Dijakovic with an Avalanche Spanish Fly, Defying What Should Be Physically Possible (NXT 08/28/19)
Just watch the dang video. There is nothing we could possibly write here that the header and video don’t already say. How is a 300-plus pound man able to hit a Spanish Fly on a man that is 6’5″ and 275 lbs? How did the ring not immediately explode into a million pieces? How did they not push Keith Lee immediately after this? It’s too many questions for us to tackle, but one thing is for sure is that this move alone is probably the reason why we got somewhere around five more matches involving Keith Lee and Dominick Dijakovic. We won’t hold that against the spot, though; if we ran NXT we’d probably have done the same.
Runners-up: That fucking PCO bump (NJPW/ROH G1 Supercard); Making a man drag himself through broken glass to escape a Boston Crab, WTF (AEW Full Gear)
Dot Coolest Moment
Orange Cassidy [O-God], the Bathroom Creeper (AEW Dynamite 11/13/19)
Orange Cassidy is the goddamn best.
Runners-up: Jericho loses the AEW Title at a Longhorn Steakhouse (After AEW All Out), Hiromu returns as crazy as ever (NJPW Power Struggle)
Best Firefly Fun House Segment
Bray Wyatt tells The Story of Thanksgiving, is petrified of the Illuminati
If you’re looking for the perfect representation of the batshit bonkers year Bray Wyatt has had, there’s no better representative than the Firefly Funhouse’s Thanksgiving special. You want the puppets being funny and doing weird things? We’ve got that in spades. You want Bray Wyatt yelling conspiracy theories? How about Thanksgiving as a celebration of the war between the Lizard People and the Musclemen! Do you like Bray’s “Muscle Man Dance?” Well now there’s the even better Muscleman Rap! Oh, and it’s still creepy as fuck and has information about serial killers in the background, because of course it does.
Runners-up: Bray Wyatt does the Muscle Man Dance (Raw 06/03/2019); Bray Wyatt feeds The Boss money (Raw 09/02/2019)
Best Promo (Not Featuring Bray Wyatt)
Cody loves his brother (The Road to Double or Nothing, Episode 14)
If there was ever a match that didn’t need a story or any sort of promo to sell it, Cody vs. Dustin Rhodes was it. Brother vs. brother; a contest for the right to their father’s legacy; the Goldust vs. Stardust match we always deserved; the point is, it sells itself. But not to be satisfied with that, Cody, in one continuous take, runs the audience through an emotional roller-coaster and recontextualizes the “Dream match” (pun completely intended) as one of generational warfare, his older brother a proxy for the yardstick Cody and his contemporaries are unfairly held to and is desperate to prove that he has surpassed. Who do you root for with that – the Prodigal Son brother whom we all love and respect, or the “good brother gone wrong” demanding a sea change and, we hate to say, is absolutely in the right? In a little over four minutes, Cody added a whole layer of complexity and pathos to a match that would have been just fine without it, and ended up helping it blossom into one of the best stories of the year in the process.
Runners-up: Jericho’s friends say how much better he is than Cody (AEW Dynamite 11/06/19), ZSJ throws a fit, hates Boris Johnson (G1 Climax 29)
Best Show
Being The Elite
It’s weird to say this, but Being The Elite continues to be one of the best things going in wrestling. Despite fears that the show could potentially stop once the focus moved from a backstage YouTube show to a two-hour live show on TNT, BTE is still the best thing the Young Bucks put out, with fascinating (and often bizarre and hilarious) storylines that are often only contained to YouTube and don’t fully cross over to Dynamite. It’s still unclear if them being so separate is hurting Dynamite or not, but for now we’ll settle with having Being the Elite being one of the funniest, most consistent and best fifteen minutes of wrestling every week for the second year in a row.
Runners-up: AEW Dynamite; WWE NXT
Best Surprise
Shibata beats the hell out of KENTA for 30 seconds because he joined Bullet Club (G1 Climax 29 Finals)
For as much as we regale these huge moments in wrestling history, it’s very rare that you get to actually see “the impossible” happen in wrestling. Katsuyori Shibata returning to the ring to face down his former friend KENTA after KENTA turned his back on Shibata for the Bullet Club, after Shibata almost lost his life to a brain bleed thanks to a career of absolutely brutal headbutts, is the closest thing we will ever get to seeing a miracle in this sport. And even if they are never able to follow up on this again, the fact that, for a brief second, we got to see the Shibata of old as if he hadn’t lost a step is more than enough to win this category hands down.
Runners-up: Jon Moxley is in the G1; NWA Powerrr is a good show (in spite of Jim Cornette)
Best Special Entrance
MEGALOMEGA – Kenny Omega as Sans (AEW Dynamite 10/30/19)
Okay look: we’re all Undertale marks here at PW.C so of course this Halloween entrance was going to be bait made specifically for us. But what really makes this entrance so special is Toby Fox’s superlative intro movie, which strangely (or sadly, depending on your perspective) is the best, if not the most character development they’ve done with Kenny since he’s come to AEW. Oh also, he shrugs to make fireworks go off! How fucking rad is that?!
Runners-up: Poppy trots around Io Shirai a lot [God damn you for this, Trace] (NXT 10/30/19); Darby Allin crowd surfs in a body bag then skateboards to the ring (AEW Dynamite 11/20/19)
Best New Gimmick
Io Shirai – Hotline Tokyo [NXT]
Io Shirai entered WWE as a generic Japanese wrestler with high-flying moves and colorful gear, but she did have a cool mask she carried to the ring while pointing at. (We’re not entirely sure why either.) But once she turned evil, she began wearing all black, screaming like crazy during her entrance (with the best new theme song of the year), and became friends with Poppy over their love of scary masks. She is one of the best things going in women’s wrestling right now.
Runners-up: Bray Wyatt – Friend or Fiend [WWE]; Nick Jackson – Merch Freak [Being the Elite]
Best Non-In-Ring Performer
Aubrey Edwards [AEW]
How was your day at work? Mine was pretty cool 🍻
— Aubrey Edwards 💖💜💙 (@RefAubrey) December 19, 2019
📹: @ruben90310 #AEWDynamite#AEWCorpusChristi @AEWrestling pic.twitter.com/T7ORwNhgU7
When you see Aubrey Edwards wearing the stripes, you know the match is going to be important. She is fantastic as a referee by never missing a spot and enhances the story by interjecting only when it’s necessary, never stealing the spotlight from the competitors. She’s not “a female referee” getting a big spot in AEW, she is simply THE referee in AEW. And she’s damn good.
Runners-up: Kevin Kelly [NJPW]; Tony Schiavone [AEW]
Tag Team/Stable of the Year
The Undisputed Era [NXT]
The Undisputed Era fulfilled their Prophecy of Gold for 2019 by ending the year with all the titles in NXT (outside of the Women’s Championship). Their promos are fantastic, their matches are always highlights on TakeOvers, and there is not a single weak link in the group. Them winning this award wasn’t just obvious, it’s simply undisputed.
Runners-up: The Inner Circle [AEW]; Lucha Bros. [AAA; AEW]
Women’s Wrestler of the Year
Shayna Baszler [NXT]
Shayna Baszler’s in-ring MMA-style work still looks amazing, and her promos consistently improve each time she’s given a chance to speak and truly sell her “ultimate bully” persona, but perhaps most impressive of all is that Baszler spent 2019 proving that she is a master of in-ring psychology with few parallels. Some have criticized her output this year by claiming that all her matches feel the same, and it’s true that Baszler rarely strays from her ground-and-pound, submission-based MMA background. But this focus on Baszler’s limited-by-choice moveset ignores the complexity Baszler brings to every match by using that moveset to bring a new dynamic to every match and new ways to power out of whatever trap has been laid for her. Even if you could argue that many of the matches boil down to a story of “everyone’s figured out Shayna’s gameplan but she finds some way to persevere through a mix of cunning, stamina and a whole lot of arrogance,” Baszler always finds some new body part to focus on, some new way to sell or some interesting new wrinkle to make every match feel distinct and leave her opponents looking strong in defeat. It’s no wonder Shayna Baszler continued to dominate the women’s division in NXT in 2019, and got to prove she dominates the entire WWE’s women’s division at Survivor Series. This wasn’t even close.
Runners-up: Becky Lynch [WWE]; Io Shirai [NXT]
Men’s Wrestler of the Year
Chris Jericho [AEW]
This was a tough decision this year, which is a nice way of saying “we almost killed each other over this category.” But Chris Jericho spent 2019 proving that not only does the Best in the World at What He Does still got it, he may even be at the top of his game. Jericho’s very presence has helped carry AEW into being recognized by casual wrestling fans as an actual threat to WWE’s monopoly in the industry, and it’s deservedly so.
Chris Jericho is the best talker in the business, bar none. He is an expert at creating memorable moments and hilarious memes, and turning absolute stupidly into comedy gold. But calling them memes downplays the enormity of what Jericho has been able to accomplish this year. He capitalized on a goofy off-hand comment while holding a bottle of sparkling wine during a backstage bit to the point that now he’s selling actual sparkling wine that’s supposedly good. He’s helped elevate the profiles of everyone in his orbit, be they members of his entourage, opponents in his way or MJF just taking a second to spar with one of the greats. He’s gotten crowds to be into Jake Hager… okay true, that one sucks in hindsight because Hager’s a transphobic dipshit who needs to stay off Twitter, but you have to admit, it’s kind of amazing that Jericho was able to get Hager more popular with crowds in a few weeks than he was in WWE over his ten-plus years there. And while he’s clearly not the wrestler he used to be, Cruel Dad can still bring it in the ring and is nicely settling into his Harley Race-style role of an old wrestling man who hates you and will beat the Christ out of you for existing. His matches against Darby Allin, Cody and Kenny Omega were legitimately great matches, and his IWGP Heavyweight Championship match against Kazuchika Okada was also an underrated gem.
So congratulations to Chris Jericho for a year in which you, once again, justified to everyone why you’re the GoaT. Now please stop doing whatever the hell it is you’re doing on your fucking podcast. You’re making it really hard to keep justifying this.
Runners-up: “The American Nightmare” Cody [AEW], Will Ospreay [NJPW]
Best Feud/Storyline
Chris Jericho vs. AEW [AEW]
All Chris Jericho wanted was a “thank you”. But they wouldn’t give it to him. You did this, AEW. It was you all along.
Runners-up: Cody vs. Dustin Rhodes [AEW]; Candace LeRae vs. Io Shirai [NXT]
Best Event
AEW Double or Nothing
AEW Double or Nothing was the first “official” All Elite Wrestling show, and they started things off with a bang. This was their proving ground to show that All In wasn’t a fluke and that they are capable of not just putting on a great show, but running an entire wrestling company, and they nailed it. And while it helps that PW.C’s own Oscar was in attendance, there’s no denying that watching Double or Nothing live was seeing a history that deserves to be remembered in the making.
Runners-up: NXT TakeOver XXV; NXT TakeOver Toronto
Match of the Year
- Cody w/ Brandi Rhodes vs. “The Natural” Dustin Rhodes (AEW Double or Nothing)
- Will Ospreay vs. Shingo Takagi (NJPW Best of the Super Juniors Finals)
- Lucha Bros. (Rey Fenix & Pentagon, Jr.) vs. The Young Bucks (Matt & Nick Jackson) [Escalata de la Muerte match for the AAA Tag Team Championships] (AEW All Out)
- Shingo Takagi vs. Tetsuya Naito (NJPW G1 Climax 29 – Night 14)
- Jon Moxley vs. Tomohiro Ishii (NJPW G1 Climax 29 – Night 6)
- Kenny Omega vs. Jon Moxley [non-sanctioned match] (AEW Full Gear)
- The Young Bucks vs. Private Party (AEW Dynamite 10/09/19)
- Johnny Gargano vs. Adam Cole [2 out of 3 falls match for the NXT Championship] (NXT TakeOver New York)
- Matt Riddle vs. Drew Gulak (Evolve 131)
- Jushin “Thunder” Liger vs. Minoru Suzuki (NJPW King of Pro Wrestling)
